Barbara Levick

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Barbara Mary Levick made two solo trips to Turkey in the mid-1950s, a young woman travelling alone through Anatolia at a time when the field of epigraphy was dominated by Scottish men. She was working on her doctoral thesis, supervised by the eminent Roman historian Ronald Syme, and she was researching Roman colonies in a corner of Asia Minor that her male contemporaries had largely left unexplored. Of all the scholars making those journeys at that time, she was the only one who published a book from her research. That book, which appeared in 1967, was still being called a resilient classic of Roman history four decades later. Levick was born on the 21st of June 1931 and died on the 6th of December 2023, at the age of 92. Her career at St Hilda's College, Oxford spanned decades and produced biographies of emperors, empresses, and politicians that shaped how a generation read the Late Roman Republic and Early Empire. The questions that her life raises are worth sitting with: how does someone carve out a place in a field that was not built with them in mind, and what does it take to turn a neglected corner of scholarship into lasting knowledge?

• 2. The Road to Pisidia

  ›

  Ronald Syme supervised Levick's DPhil in the mid-1950s, steering her toward Roman colonies in South Asia Minor. Syme was among the most formidable Roman historians of the twentieth century, and to work under him was to enter a tradition with exacting standards for epigraphic evidence. Levick's two solo journeys through Turkey placed her in a lineage of fieldworkers, but with a deliberate distinction: while a group of male contemporaries were tracing the better-known Anatolian routes, she focused on Pisidia, a region they had largely passed over. Pisidia sits in what is now south-central Turkey, and the inscriptions surviving there offered evidence that had received little sustained attention since the 1920s. Her fieldwork at Yalvaç, a town in that region, produced finds that would anchor her first book and demonstrate the particular value of working in places others had overlooked. The comparison is pointed: her contemporaries also travelled in Anatolia, but the book that came from those expeditions was hers alone.

• 3. A Resilient Classic

  ›

  Roman Colonies in Southern Asia Minor appeared from the Clarendon Press, Oxford, in 1967, the same year Levick published an article in The Classical Review on the Lex Servilia. The monograph drew directly on her doctoral research, and its durability came from a methodological choice: Levick wove together both epigraphic and numismatic evidence, treating coins and inscriptions as complementary records rather than separate bodies of knowledge. Four decades after publication, scholars were still describing it as a resilient classic of Roman history. The work's staying power also owed something to its subject. The Roman impact on Asia Minor was an area where gaps in the scholarly record had persisted for years, and Levick's command of material that had sat neglected since the 1920s meant she was, in effect, restoring a body of evidence to active scholarship. Her appointment as a university fellow and tutor for Roman History at St Hilda's College in 1959 provided the institutional footing from which that research would eventually be published.

• 4. Emperors and Epigraphs

  ›

  Levick shaped the format of the Monumenta Asiae Minoris Antiqua series, directing two of its published volumes. This inscriptions project sits at the intersection of her twin roles: the scholar who had spent time in Turkish fields reading stones, and the editor who could impose order on a major reference series. Her biographies of Roman emperors brought that same combination of technical precision and broad historical imagination to individual lives. Tiberius the Politician appeared in 1976, followed by The Government of the Roman Empire sourcebook in 1985. Claudius came out in 1990 and was later translated into French in 2002 by the historian Isabelle Cogitore, extending the book's reach beyond English-language readers. Vespasian followed in 1999, The Year of the Four Emperors in 2000, and Augustus: Image and Substance in 2010. Her attention also turned to women of the imperial court: Julia Domna, Syrian Empress was published by Routledge in 2007, and Faustina I and II: Imperial Women of the Golden Age by Oxford University Press in 2014. Catiline, published by Bloomsbury in 2015, marked a turn toward the Late Republic. A fuller bibliography of her work up to 2007 is held in the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies, in a supplement published in her honour that year.

• 5. Recognition and Legacy

  ›

  St Hilda's College commissioned Jane Cursham to paint Levick's portrait, a mark of the esteem the college placed in her long tenure there. The 2007 volume published in her honour by the Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies carried the Latin title Vita Vigilia Est, a phrase that translates roughly as life is watchfulness, lending a scholarly dignity to the occasion. Her critics consistently described her imperial biographies in largely positive terms, and she was recognised within Roman history circles as one of the leading historians of her generation. The translation of her Claudius biography into French pointed toward a readership that extended across national boundaries in European classical scholarship. Her article on Agrippa Postumus, published in Historia in 1972, and her 1978 piece asking whether a particular document represented a cry from the heart from Tiberius Caesar, showed that alongside book-length arguments she was consistently producing focused interventions in specific scholarly debates. The accumulation of that record, across decades at Oxford, left a body of work substantial enough that the French translation of a single biography was only one small measure of its reach.